How Well Does Your Practice Answer the Phone?
The phone is the front door for most patients, and it is the part of the practice least often measured. Eight questions on what happens at opening, on hold, after hours and when a message needs to reach a clinician. Answer honestly and you get a score, a band and a short list of what to fix first.
Answer for a typical week, not your best one. If your phone system reports engaged, abandoned and hold figures, pull them up before you start. If it does not, that is itself an answer to the last question.
Practice Phone Audit Scorecard
Eight questions. Answer for a typical week. No patient information.
A self-assessment to structure a practice discussion. It is not an audit of your phone system and not clinical advice. Nothing entered is recorded or transmitted, and no patient information should be entered.
What the Score Measures
The questions cover three things: whether calls get through, what happens to the ones that do, and whether anyone knows. A practice can be excellent clinically and still lose patients at the switchboard.
Calls that never reach anyone
Engaged tones at opening and calls abandoned on hold are the invisible losses. The caller does not leave a complaint. They ring the next practice on the list, or they do not book at all. Your phone system is the only place this shows up, and most practices have never looked.
New patients decide in one call
An existing patient will ring back. A new patient who hears an engaged tone or sits on hold usually will not. The new-patient capture question asks whether you know how many first-time callers become bookings, because that ratio is the one that decides whether the practice grows.
Messages are a clinical safety issue
A message from a patient to a clinician that is taken incompletely, filed in the wrong place or never passed on is not only an administrative failure. The handover question scores whether messages arrive with the right detail, in the right place, and with a record that they did.
How the Score Works
Eight questions, each scored from 0 to 3. The maximum is 24. Your band is set by your total as a percentage of that maximum.
Each answer is scored 0 to 3
The best available answer scores 3, the worst scores 0. There is no weighting between questions, so every area counts equally.
Totals are converted to a percentage
Your total out of 24 becomes a percentage of the maximum, so the bands are the same regardless of how many questions you were able to answer confidently.
Three bands
Seventy-five per cent and above is a phone system that is working. Forty-five to seventy-four has a specific gap to close. Below forty-five is losing calls in more than one place.
Actions follow the band
Each band lists the next steps in order. The first action in every band is the same: get the numbers from your phone system, because everything else depends on them.
The Four Places Practices Lose Calls
The pattern is consistent across GP, dental, allied health and specialist practices. The fixes are different, but the leaks are in the same places.
The opening surge
Most practices take a large share of the day's calls in the first hour. One or two receptionists cannot answer them all, and the phone system either returns an engaged tone or queues callers until they give up. The fix is not a third receptionist for one hour a day. It is overflow handling that answers the calls the desk cannot.
- Check engaged and abandoned counts for the first hour of each day
- Note whether the same-day appointment rush is driving the peak
- Consider online booking for routine requests to thin the queue
- Route overflow to a service or system that can book, not only take a message
Recall calls that never get made
Outbound recall calls are the first task dropped when inbound calls are heavy. The recall list grows, and the practice loses both the revenue and the clinical follow-up. Scoring this honestly means asking what share of the overdue list was actually contacted last month, not whether recalls are a task somebody has.
- Measure contact rate on the overdue list monthly
- Move recall contact out of the inbound rush, or off the desk entirely
- Use the patient recall revenue calculator on this site to size the gap
- Count a contact only when the patient replies or is spoken to
After hours
A voicemail that says the practice is closed is the most common after-hours arrangement and the least useful. It cannot book, cannot triage and cannot tell a clinician that a patient needs them. Scoring well here means the after-hours caller gets the emergency direction, a way to book, and an escalation path for anything urgent.
- Listen to your own after-hours greeting as a patient would
- Check whether after-hours callers can book or only leave a message
- Confirm the on-call escalation path exists and has been tested
- The after-hours protocol checklist on this site walks through building one
Nobody has the numbers
The last question asks whether the practice has phone data at all. Many practices cannot say how many calls they received last week, let alone how many were missed. Without the numbers, every other answer on this scorecard is a guess, and no improvement can be shown to have worked.
- Ask your phone provider for a call report covering a full month
- Track calls offered, answered, abandoned and average hold time
- Record new-patient calls and new-patient bookings separately
- Review the figures monthly at the same meeting as the appointment book
Next Steps
Patient Communication Audit
Fourteen questions across every channel, not only the phone.
Run the audit →Medical Answering Service
How overflow and after-hours calls are answered, booked and handed over.
See how it works →What Is an AI Medical Receptionist?
A plain explanation of what an AI receptionist does and does not do in a practice.
Read the explainer →Frequently Asked Questions
Where do I get engaged, abandoned and hold time figures?
From your phone system or provider. Most hosted phone systems have a reporting screen showing calls offered, calls answered, calls abandoned in queue and average time to answer, usually by hour of day. If you use a traditional line with no reporting, your provider may be able to supply a call log, and the absence of any data is a fair reason to score the last question at the lowest option. Ask for a full month so the opening-hour pattern is visible.
What counts as an abandoned call?
A call where the patient hung up before anyone answered. Phone systems usually report it as abandoned in queue. It does not include calls that received an engaged tone, because those never entered the queue, which is why the scorecard asks about engaged lines and abandoned calls as separate questions. Both are lost calls, but they show up in different reports and have different fixes.
How do I measure new-patient capture?
Count the number of first-time callers in a month and the number of those who booked. Many practices do not record the first figure, which is why the question includes an option for not knowing. A simple approach is a tally kept by reception for two weeks, or a report from a phone system that tags first-time numbers. The ratio matters more than the raw count, because it tells you whether the calls you are attracting are turning into patients.
What does good message handover look like?
The message reaches the right clinician, contains the patient identifier, callback number, the concern and the time, is filed where the clinician will see it, and there is a record that it was delivered and actioned. Scoring well means that happens every time by a defined process, not most of the time because the receptionist is diligent. A message that sits on a sticky note or in a personal phone is the pattern to score down.
Is this a substitute for a full communication audit?
No. This scorecard covers the phone only. The patient communication audit on this site covers SMS, email, online booking, reminders and the website as well, and takes longer. If your phone score is low, fix the phone first, because it is where the highest-value calls arrive. If the phone score is fine, the wider audit is the next step.
Is anything I answer here recorded?
No. The scorecard runs in your browser and nothing is transmitted or stored on our side. Nothing about your patients is asked for and no free text is collected. You can screenshot the result for a practice meeting if that is useful.
Know Which Calls You Are Losing?
Tell us your band and your call volume. We will show what overflow and after-hours answering would look like for your practice, and what it would cost against the calls you are currently losing.